Late spring/early summer return hoped for;
Local business owner, preservationist envision a multifloor music/arts hub

By Patrick Sawers

A recently-shuttered downtown music venue is set to reopen, expected to resume operations within months thanks to a pair of community builders with considerable ties to Buffalo’s music scene.

Mohawk Place, the small but vital club at 47 E. Mohawk Street, has been purchased from its previous owner, and the beloved venue, which originally opened in 1990, will be forging ahead with the same management but a different business structure.

“Music is my core,” said preservationist Bernice Radle, one of the two key players behind the recent purchase. “I’ve played at Mohawk a bunch of times, I go to Mohawk all the time. When I saw that they were closing, I said, ‘This is so silly.’ The place is kind of a dive, running it’s not that expensive. And I’ve worked in real estate for so many years, I said, ‘This is silly, why are we stressing out over this?’”

Radle is the executive director of Preservation Buffalo Niagara – although she is pursuing this project independently of that organization – and she teamed up with local businessman Frank DiMaria, also a lifelong musician with deep ties to the venue.

“Once I saw it was closing, I said, ‘There’s got to be something we can do,’” said DiMaria, who is managing partner and CEO of Frank’s Basement Systems, as well as a few other local businesses. “Bernice posted something on Facebook that said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to try to save Mohawk,’ and at that same time I had already sent several messages to Mohawk directly and was starting that conversation. So I said, ‘Hey, Bernice, you understand the nonprofit world a lot better than I do, I have all the building infrastructure and I’m willing to self-fund this project, we should collaborate on it.’”

The two met and fleshed out their vision for the future of the establishment, which includes preserving the first-floor bar and concert space while renovating and opening up the second and third stories to a variety of art-related functions.

“Our vision right now is that Mohawk is going to continue to be a venue, tried and true, the last venue in town that maintains its character, only it’s cleaned up a bit,” DiMaria said. “But we don’t want to take the stickers off the walls, we don’t want to take the tin (from the ceiling) down. We just want to make it a better space where people feel comfortable, while still maintaining its presence.”

“When it starts back up again I anticipate a lot of changes for the better,” said Mike Thorpe, who has served as Mohawk Place’s general manager for the last ten years (and is also known as Mike Thor). “But preserving the atmosphere was always the mission, and it will be going forward.”

Adding to that sense of authenticity, Thorpe noted, is the fact that much of the club’s staff is expected to return once it reopens.

“That’s the way it is looking right now,” he said. “I have reached out to them, I’ve sat down with them and it’s looking pretty good. Everybody for the most part said they are very interested in being a part of it. The amount of positive energy coming from that crowd right now, it is absolutely beautiful to be in the same room as them when they’re talking about how they want things to be.”

“They’ve been working for months and months and months, running it on their own without a lot of support,” DiMaria added, “so the folks who are there have carried this thing out of love. And the first thing we did is have a meeting with them and just apologized and said, ‘Look, we’re sorry you haven’t had the support that you needed. We would love for you to be a part of this if you want.’ And they all said, ‘We want to stay.’”

Among the returning staff will be Marty Boratin, who has served as the venue’s booking coordinator for a majority of the time since the mid-1990s.

By the time the club closed down in late January, Boratin said, Radle and DiMaria had already unofficially arrived at the deal to purchase Mohawk Place for $175,000 from previous owner Rick Platt, who had owned it since 2014. The contract would officially be signed on Feb. 28, but in view of the tentative agreement Boratin went right on booking acts in anticipation of the club’s eventual reopening.

“I didn’t really delete any holes we had in the calendar when things closed down,” said Boratin, “because it looked pretty good that the place was going to be bought. But we’re booking lots of stuff, and right now I’m booking shows as far out as December.”

As for when the club will reopen, Boratin is less certain but said he expects it will resume operation within a few months.

“I’m going to guess sometime in May would be the reopening, but there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes things that I’m not quite sure about,” he said. “But hopefully in May.”

“We don’t have a time frame yet for reopening,” Radle confirmed, “but I would say our best-case scenario is late spring, early summer.”

In the meantime, DiMaria said, there are repairs that need to be done – these range from HVAC and plumbing concerns to a few electrical and roof issues – and a number of upgrades will also be made to the bar area and to some of the sound equipment.

From a business perspective, DiMaria added, he and Radle will be forming a nonprofit to properly manage Mohawk Place’s business affairs, and also to ensure the venue’s longevity.

“It could run as a for-profit bar,” he said, “but I think that in creating a nonprofit we’re kind of giving this space back to the community, which needs it so direly with the loss of Mulligan’s and the Pink and all these tragedies. But we also have a bigger mission to serve, in my opinion. We just want to make it a place that the community is invested in, and we really want to try to build a nonprofit that’s basically triple net leasing the building and creating art spaces upstairs.”

Specific plans for the upstairs have yet to be solidified, but DiMaria and Radle each noted that they are firmly opposed to developing the space into high-end luxury apartments.

“I think our goal is to allow the entire building to work within the arts and music space,” Radle said, “so right now we’re still trying to explore what the upstairs could be. We want to have good, affordable space for the artists and we want to have affordable space for the cultural community.”

This spring, said Radle, she intends to begin the process of applying for local landmark status. Boratin noted that the structure dates back to 1896, adding that “it’s not the kind of building you want to risk losing.”

“I remember being a 15-, 16-year-old kid and having a chance to play here, and it meant so much to me,” said DiMaria, who currently plays drums in the instrumental power trio HUNS. “It’s just such an unpretentious community of people and folks that come together, and because of the under-300 cap, it’s more intimate. The community there has always been so supportive, if it’s 10 people or 300 people there you get the same feeling and it’s always felt good.”

And while he and Radle presently have their hands full readying Mohawk Place for reopening, DiMaria indicated that the duo already have another project on the horizon. Recently, he said, they reached a tentative agreement to buy the building next door, which houses the now-defunct bar Electric Avenue, and in time that project will be receiving similar treatment.

“With that one we want to, again, leave it to form,” he said. “We’re going to try to maintain some kind of bar at Electric Avenue. That one’s a little bit more difficult, there’s more work to be done there. But we’re working early on with some architects on figuring out how we can best use the space upstairs.”

The preservation and restoration of those two properties, DiMaria noted, will help restore some measure of character to that part of downtown Buffalo.

“We want to revitalize that corner to be a really vibrant corner, like it used to be,” he said. “It has a dead soul and we want to restore it back. It’s half a city block that’s been dark for like the last two years.”

Patrick Sawers is a writer living in Buffalo.